This disclosure presents various embodiments of a semantic data architecture that uses a compact formalism that supports operation of semantic reasoners (i.e., inference engines). The semantic data architecture allows semantic reasoners to be defined. The semantic data architecture also supports customizing of semantic reasoners. In one embodiment, the semantic data architecture is based on an incremental extension of eight functional layers. Each subsequent functional layer can use or extend the previous functional layer(s).
Description logic oriented reasoners, such as the HermiT OWL Reasoner (see <http://hermit-reasoner.com>) and the Pellet OWL 2 Reasoner for (see <http://clarkparsia.com/pellet>), use (hyper)tableau calculus to perform various inference tasks on OWL2, using its direct semantics, while offering an application program interface (API), but less than desirable possibilities for configuring the algorithms. The Jena Apache Environnment, for example, offers a flexible environment that allows combining forward and backward inference engines, but does not provide enough expressiveness to specify the many tactics required to handle the variety of profiles and to tune performance to the specific needs of the application. For additional information on the Jena Apache Environment, see Apache Jena—Reasoners and Rule Engines: Jena Inference Support, The Apache Software Foundation, Copyright 2011-2013.